E x t r e m e T o r t u r e

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E x t r e m e T o r t u r e
~ H i s t o r y ~

NOTE : This page was taken from Puzzle Palace . . . . . as well as the solution pics, which were reconstituted to fit within the normal parameters of my web page .

This puzzle is an exercise in complexity. It was designed by Frans de Vreugd of The Netherlands. It is one of a family of separated board burrs. For years the puzzling community had contented themselves with six piece board burrs, that is, six boards flat together in three pairs forming a 3-axis burr. Jim Gooch of Oregon suggested to Frans separating each board from its partner by one space. Frans designed a computer program to search for such puzzles and was unsuccessful in finding any that stayed together until he came up with one using zigzag pieces. Thus his first separated six piece board burr puzzle was christened 'ZigZag'.
Frans uses the number of moves to extract the first piece from the assembled puzzle as a measure of complexity. So, Zigzag a level 7 complexity. Actually, since the next piece to be removed takes an additional 9 moves, he refers to the complexity of Zigzag as 7,9.
Weeks later Frans came up with another puzzle which had a complexity of level 17,4. He sent me the plans and I constructed one and tried to put it together. It was too difficult for me and I named it torture. Finally, Frans made one hard push to see what the most complex possible separated six piece separated board burr puzzle might be and his computer program came up with a marvelous puzzle with an extraordinary level 28,21! We called this one Extreme Torture. On the next page youšll observe the solution sheet for Extreme Torture since no human is expected to come upon this solution unaided.
The puzzle is made from different colored acrylic since there are 8 ways to assemble the pieces, but only one way will give you the pieces with matching colors as pictured here.

The solution can be seen here

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Great for displaying your prize puzzles in their special cabinets . . . . . and a plethora of many other uses as well